This crystal scam is making the rounds again and I wanted to be sure no one in this forum is duped by these outrageously priced pieces of slag glass. If you look on Etsy for “Andara Crystals” you will find something like this image below. This shop is selling a 195 gram piece of “Andara Crystal” for $175 I’m not going to link to the shop because this is a ripoff and I don’t want to contribute but if you’re really curious, the name of the shop on Etsy is Lumietres.
Andara Crystals are nothing more than slag glass and aren’t actually crystals at all. This isn’t to say that one’s experiences with slag glass can’t be life changing, as some have talked about their effects, but to charge people an obscene amount of money for something that you can pick up for $9 per pound on Etsy is outrageous. And you can even buy slag glass in some home improvement places because it’s used for decoration.
Anyway, a friend of mine (who is also a geologist) broke down everything scientifically wrong with claiming Andara Crystals are “monoatomic andara crystals” in a great blog post and I recommend everyone read it to better protect yourself from the scammers who try and take advantage of our communities.
Read the full post → Glass based scams: Monoatomic Andara Crystals
Ok. Let’s dig into the misused science gobbledygook. Monoatomic means “one atom” and is used to refer to elements that can be stable as a single atom. In order to be stable they need a full stable valence shell of electrons. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’m really sorry, you need a whole lot of chemistry to understand that definition. But let’s make it simple…